Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday May 25, 2010 @04:14PM
from the ooh-shiny dept.

ddfall writes "Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms. Chrome 5.0.375.55 is available to download from google.com/chrome. Users who currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function."

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

So if I copy all but the first character, I get exactly what I copied, but if I copy the first character it prepends the protocol to the front on the clipboard? That's incredibly inconsistent. I should have control over whether or not I get the protocol when I copy, and that control should be the extent of my selection.

If Chrome does this, then this is a flaw. Transparent clipboard modification should never be done, by any program.

A (much) better method would be to insert the protocol string when the user clicks on the URL bar.

I can't stand all this extra logic they've stuck into URL bars (and other text fields, for that matter) in the last ten years or so... It's a text entry field, it should act like one. It shouldn't select all when I click on it, it shouldn't try to guess where I want my selection to end, snap it to word boundaries or whatever... And the simplest, most straight-forward way of making the protocol selectable for copy/paste is just to have it in the URL bar in the first place.

Rather agree with you except the bit about snapping to word boundaries. If you complain about that, you vastly underrate its importance. I get that with xterms, not text entry fields, but I tell you, double-clicking on the beginning word and right-clicking on an ending word (or blank at the end of the line) to select is so much damn easier than trying to drag the mouse so precisely from the beginning of the selection to the end. Just that way of selecting has probably saved me days of computer time, and that's with me very rarely using the mouse (in an xterm). It's one of the only things I think a mouse is useful for in an xterm.

Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why. No other justification is needed.

One of the commenters on the CNET story on the issue compared it to the Windows practice of hiding file extensions, which is a good analogy. We know how well that worked out (click here on mysterious_attachment.doc{.exe} and see what happens!) Sure, the protocol name may be gabble to most users, but at least the information's there, right out front. And occasionally it even leads them to educate themselves, asking a more technically knowledgeable friend, "What is that http thing, anyway?"

I just don't see that it's a big deal, and I'm a rather technical user who's been known to copy-paste urls on a regular basis.

Your extension-hiding analogy is flawed. To be closer to the security-threat that is hidden extensions, you'd need a browser that hides.com and other TLDs in URLs. That would be seriously sub-optimal - "hey, does slashdot/user.pl go to the real site, or slashdot.ru?"

http is the only hidden protocol that I've noticed, which is fine because it's the most common, so you'll know thing

1. Copying to clipboard:- selecting the whole URL prepends http:/// [http] in front in the clipboard (expected behavior would be to only copy what is being selected)- it is impossible to copy the full URL without the protocol- selecting part of the URL only copies the selected part (which is expected), unless you select just the domain part, in which case it prepends http:/// [http] again

Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why.

That's a pretty small minority -- I've actually seen more people at the other end of the scale, where they don't know what the URL display is at all. If they want to eg check their yahoo mail, they don't go to the URL box and type "mail.yahoo.com", they go to the search box, type "google", search (using google) to find google, click on the first result to get to the google home page, then type "yahoo mail" into that box, search, and click the first result there...

(This is what happens when we train people to follow patterns with no understanding of how it actually works:( )

When you type in a URL directly to the address bar do you input "http://www.slashdot.org" or "www.slashdot.org"?
Personally I think it's fine to leave out http and only display the protocol if it is different like https, ftp, etc...
Of course I have updated to the latest version of Chrome and STILL see the http in the address bar so I don't even know what the fuss is all about.

Heh. I didn't even realize that. The funny thing is, I have no
idea how to upgrade anyway. They don't have the usual File/Edit/View
menus. There's just a wrench icon, and it doesn't appear to have any
updater under its menu hierarchy.

Googling around (heheh) I found out they left out the F/E/V on purpose.
That might make sense for mobile, but I'm using a nice wide LCD with
more screen real estate than you can shake a stick at. Without F/E/V
I feel like I'm subject to somebody's vision of "clean minimalist design"
where they thought they knew what was best for the user. For cryin' out
loud, if I wanted to use a Mac I'd already be using one. Hey... maybe it'll
automaticly upgrade to 6.0 if I throw it in the recycling bin... no, wait...
AHA! The updater is in the "About Chrome" thingy.

Oh sure, bury the updater in the widget that usually just shows copyright
info. That's, just... wonderful. To be fair though, interfaces to updaters
aren't quite as standard as F/E/V.

"Without F/E/V I feel like I'm subject to somebody's vision of "clean minimalist design" where they thought they knew what was best for the user. For cryin' out loud, if I wanted to use a Mac I'd already be using one."

FWIW, the Mac version of Chrome *does* have File/Edit/View still in the menubar (working as expected), and does not hide http:/// [http] or in any other way mangle your copying of urls.

I didn't realize it until he mentioned it, but I see it now: The url field does not show the "http://" anymore. It does show "https://", but I guess someone decided that it was more useful to show more of the actual URL and remove "http://", as it's not informative in any way anymore.

The downside of this is that (at least for me, on Ubuntu 9.10) the clipboard unreliably re-adds the http to copied URLs - it often does, but sometimes it just leaves it off, risking links like this [slashdot.org] when not paying attention.

I haven't updated yet, but I can see now that hiding the http:// is a pain in the ass for communicating URLs onto other channels. Cut and paste a properly formatted URL into a chat window, email, or instant message, and most clients will correctly discover, highlight and support the hyperlink. Now people will have to edit the mangled URL when copying from their browser to get the same functionality. Perhaps the new Chrome will "auto-insert" the protocol prefix when copying the URL to the operating sys

The "beta" indicator is an indication of your update channel... it's not part of the version number. I'm guessing you're on the beta channel and noticed the stable channel got the same version, but yours still says "beta". Am I right?

a hard sell for me. The entire point of linux and me switching to it was the privacy and security. What is my incentive to switch from a floss browser on a floss OS to a nonfree browser (or not as free as id like to see it) which saps my bandwidth on the backend to report my surfing habits back to google.

and no, i cant trust that it isnt communicating with google or wont decide to at some point in the future. The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.

I can appreciate this concern and would suggest that there's a middle ground: It is possible to monitor your network traffic and setup firewall rules to stop this sort of thing if you're that concerned. I do this myself from time to time and am always surprised at what I see going back to the mother ship at <INSERT VENDOR X HERE>. It's not just Google you should worry about.

which saps my bandwidth on the backend to report my surfing habits back to google.

The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.

Several points...
1) If you want to eliminate the "phone home", you can do so very easily under options-->under the hood. Uncheck the top 5 boxes; now your data is secure. This is what I did on a live-boot cd where CPU and bandwidth are at a premium.

2) If you do not feel you can trust that it isnt communicating, you can actually VERIFY that, either through about:net-internals, or wireshark, or netstat, or router logs. Not to mention most of the source is actually AVAILABLE....

The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.

I don't think so.

I do. The common mantra seems to be, "Enough privacy to get people to stop complaining." Google, Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe are all guilty of this thinking, and they're showing no sign of letting up.

Some may argue that "people" should be replaced with "governments," but that's a pointless swap. Governments are made of people, and people will complain about privacy abuses to governments, knowing full well that it won't do any good to complain to the abusers.

Facebook went from being a closed network to an open one with several changes to the privacy controls, that awful Beacon feature, etc. They never back down until there's immense pressure. Usually even then they don't back down entirely. And it's all so they can monetize their site.

Google made a mistake with their wifi collection software and quickly admitted to it when asked about it, then came up with a plan to destroy the data.

Does Chrome now support a bookmark sidebar? With the wide-screen TFTs everywhere these days a bookmark sidebar has become a must-have for me. I cannot stand bookmark pull-down menus. And to make things worse Chrome has put the default Bookmark menu in the upper- right hand corner of the screen, which for some reason is a place of the screen where my cursor never is.

Extensions have been in place since 4.0 or 4.1 or something. Unfortunately there are no APIs for PROPER blocking of resources (ie stopping Chrome from fetching them) but there are already extensions that can at least remove them from the DOM while the page is loading. My favorite is AdBlock [google.com].

As for NoScript, Chrome has "lite" functionality built in. You can use Options > Under the Hood > Content Settings to turn off JavaScript and Plugins and then whitelist individual sites when the icons pop up on

Chrome has many extensions and yes Adblock. However Adblock only removes the display of ads. It does not prevent downloading of the ad. So you may not see the ad, but it is still downloading, eating bandwidth and making money for whoever has ads on their site.

Yes we all know it has extensions. But Chrome doesn't have Noscript. It does have Javascript-blocking and whitelists but it's an all or nothing choice for each website, which is less than ideal. Chrome also has an adblocker, but it isn't a proper adblocker; it just hides the ads. So clearly, the you are wrong, and Chrome is still not a good choice of browser for the GP.

Well let's see: OP asked if it can "accept add-ons yet" - which it can, and that's what the reply said. He also asked if it had an ad-blocker, which it does. The fact that you choose to declare it to be not a "proper" adblocker is entirely your preference; if OP is like me he couldn't give a fuck whether the ads get downloaded but not displayed (or maybe he could; he didn't say either way).

You also dismiss the Javascript blocking because it's all-or-nothing for each site, when OP said: "or at least disable

Hopefully this version will allow development of a potent ad blocker like the famous Firefox addon. Apparently the only thing limiting it from happening is the implementation of content policies in Chrome.

I'll keep using Firefox as it is actually possible to download and install it.Since the day Google released Chrome you haven't been able to install their crappy 550k installer if you're behind a proxy.

That's not how it works. If you download the.deb file for Chrome 5 from Google's site, it does not get updated by the package manager. It also doesn't get updated the way the Windows version does. It really looks like you'd have to update it yourself. According to help, there should be a button on the about box to check for updates. The Linux version doesn't have this.

On Debian and Ubuntu, the.deb-packaged Chrome adds the Google deb archive in/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, which is automatically searched by apt and aptitude, so your regular "aptitude update; aptitude upgrade" will pull in new versions of Chrome. Presumably the Synaptic package gizmo does the same things, but I am far too cool for GUIs, so I don't know.

If you want to turn this off, and leave it off, you can change the settings in/etc/default/google-chrome.

Actually, you don't. You just need to "sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable". They setup their packages in a sane way so that it removes the beta for you (and presumably would do the same if you downloaded it from the website and did a "sudo dpkg -i").

I suggest, instead of actually installing the.deb, you simply extract the files from the archive to a local directory using dpkg -x chrome.deb.This way, you're not giving Google any special permissions on your machine, which effectively amount to root access.Chrome runs perfectly from a local user's home directory when extracted like this.

No, you're wrong. Chrome's deb installer automatically adds the Google repositories, so Linux users get updates for it like they for any other package.

But there really isn't any point in running Chrome instead of Chromium on Linux any way. They're the exact same thing except for the logo and Googe's stalky tracking system, and Chromium usually has better package management.

Placing the tabs horizontally was a serious blunder. A browser where the UI is designed for a maximum of ~5 tabs is horribly broken, as far as I'm concerned. Both for work purposes, and more importantly, for porn browsing.

It's not that absurd. Having a widescreen monitor (as is common nowadays), my experience is that there is very little vertical space for web content after subtracting space for tool/status/menu bars. At the same time, there's lots of empty horizontal space. Because of that, I switched to vertical tabs in Firefox recently and am pleased with it.